Mistakes to Avoid When Using Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing has quickly emerged as the number one avenue for reaching out to new customers and engaging them with your business and products.

These days more than 60% of the people in the world use social media and so utilizing it for marketing is ideal. Using social media to market your business is not the same as using it for your personal profile and it is easy to make social media marketing errors when you first start out. This article is a guide to mistakes to avoid when using social media marketing.

1. Attempting Social Media Marketing Alone

When businesses first decide to implement a social media marketing strategy, they often hold the common misconception that they will be able to do it themselves. After all, most of us use social media in our personal lives and it is not difficult to set up, and so businesses wrongly believe that using social media to market their business will be essentially the same. We spoke to the social media marketing experts from Nexis-Novus who told us that an effective social media marketing strategy is extremely complex. Businesses must identify their target audience, work out which social media platforms they use most often, create content that they want to receive and convert social media traffic into customers. Without the proper knowledge and expertise, this can be almost impossible for the majority of businesses that have no experience in social media marketing. All businesses look for ways to save money, but DIY social media marketing is not an area where you want to scrimp on spending. In order to take advantage of the huge number of benefits of social media marketing, it is usually advisable to bring in the experts.

2. Not Giving Yourself Enough Time

This is a big reason why many social media marketing campaigns tend to fail as businesses grossly underestimate how long something is going to take. For example, a business may have only just started social media marketing and after two weeks they haven’t seen any significant difference in their sales. They look at other companies who are succeeding with social media marketing and they start to think it is just not the right strategy for their company, or else they would be seeing the results that other companies are. Social media marketing, like anything else, takes time before it starts showing results so patience is key.

3. Not Spending Enough Time on Income Producing Activity

Income-producing activities are actions that you take that are going to directly get you
closer to signing a client. In terms of social media marketing, the end goal is to sell your product or service to clients, so an IPA is something directly related to that sale. In other forms of marketing, it is easy to identify IPAs, they include making a cold call or meeting a new client at their office, but because social media marketing works a little differently, businesses often neglect IPAs. It is so important to put the time into IPAs and when you identify a system or strategy that really works to produce income, try and standardize it so you can roll it out again and again.

4. Not Approaching the Right Type of Clients

Approaching the right type of client is very important, but when they first start using social media, many businesses make the mistake of reaching out to anyone and everyone. Because social media is so universal, it can be very tempting to just target every single social media user but this is a huge waste of time and resources. If for example, you are trying to market your carwash business in LA, there is absolutely no point in reaching out to social media users in India. Especially when paying for social media ads, make sure that you identify your target audience, and limit your outreach to them. On Facebook Ads, for example, you can set precise location parameters to make sure that you are not wasting money on reaching out to social media users who are simply never going to become your customers. Identify your target audience and run every possible analysis to find out exactly what they want and produce content accordingly. Quality is always better than quantity when it comes to converting leads to customers.

Social media marketing is a fantastic way to boost your business and reach out to new customers. It can be very easy to assume that using social media to market your business is no different from using social media in your personal life, but this is not the case. If you are looking to implement a social media marketing campaign for your business, avoid these mistakes, and consider seeking professional help to get your social media ready to go.